without this stimulating, brilliant infusion into its national life.

With such marvellous facility did this people adopt the speech and
manners of their neighbors, that in the year 1066 they were prepared to
instruct the Britons in the ways of a more polished civilization. Only
a century before the birth of William the Conqueror, his ancestors had
lived by looting. They were highwaymen and robbers by profession. His
mother, a Norman peasant girl, daughter of a tanner, won the love of
that gay duke known as "Robert the Devil." William, the child of this
unconsecrated union, upon the death of his father succeeded to the
dukedom. One of the steps in the rapid climb of this family of Rollo
had been a marriage connecting them with the royal family of England.
King Edward, William's remote cousin, died without an heir. Here was
an opportunity. With sixty thousand Norman adventurers like himself,
William started with the desperate purpose of invading England and
wresting the crown from his cousin Harold.

It was not the first time the Northman had invaded England. But never
before had he come bringing a higher civilization, and under the banner
of the Church! In a few weeks Harold, last king of the Saxons, was
dead, and William, Duke of Normandy, was William I., King of England.

Philip, King of France, saw with dismay his richest province ruled by a
king of England, and his own vassal wearing a crown with power superior
to his own! A door had thus opened through which would enter
entangling complications and countless woes in the future.

While William was trampling England into the dust, and with pitiless
hand rivetting a feudal chain upon the Saxons, another and greater
centre of power was developing at Rome, where the monk Hildebrand, who